Luv / Kopfüberwelle unfolds in two halves, each radiating the signature sensitivity of Sabine Vogel. “luv,” a nearly thirty-minute solo piece, sits at the intersection of field recording, flute improvisation, and subtle electronic manipulation. Vogel’s work with the Landscape Quartet shapes her approach, drawing not just on musical material but on a careful listening to site - birdsong, wind, water, and distant activity form a natural acoustic tapestry into which the flute dissolves and emerges. Extended techniques - multiphonics, microtonal coloring, whispering breath - combine with environmental sounds, forming a fragile balance between the composed and the accidental, between focus and drift. Electronics here are architectural rather than decorative, folding and refracting real-world textures around Vogel’s gentle musical phrases.
On “kopfüberwelle,” Vogel partners with Chris Abrahams (piano), weaving a dialogue between her flute and field material and his prepared piano. This live recording is marked by a tactile immediacy: Vogel’s sustained tones and subtle attacks echo against the piano’s interior - its strings, hammers, and resonating wood - while distant noises filter in from the environment. The duo avoids conventional structure, operating instead in a space shaped by unpredictability, tactility, and the resonance of lapsed time. The improvisation evolves as much through silence, friction, and spatial awareness as through defined gesture, evoking the fleeting presence of lived sound.
Luv / Kopfüberwelle marks Vogel’s work as both personal and porous - music shaped by vulnerability, modesty, and a hunger for perceptual expansion. In these pieces, the line between landscape, performer, and environment blurs. The listener is drawn into a space where musical meaning is always emerging, always contingent, and where sound’s quietest inflections carry the strongest charge of presence.
